In an era when many arts groups have suffered a downturn in funding, Santa Monica’s 18th Street Arts Center has succeeded as an ever-evolving artist space for nearly 25 years.
Those of us who voted for John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960 were fortunate enough to experience the exhilaration, the hope, and the joyful anticipation that his election brought to the nation.
Spring has definitely sprung across the Southern California arts landscape. Here’s a roundup of upcoming and ongoing events that pique my interest. I’ll report on some of them later but I think all merit your consideration now.
Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997), a female artist in her 50s, arrived in Los Angeles during the ‘60s when the mantra was “trust no one over 30” and when the art scene was dominated by hard-partying young men of the “cool school” who were creating their own new art and lifestyles.
Medvedenko the schoolteacher is in love with Masha, the daughter of the manager of a country estate. Masha is in love with Konstantin, a would-be playwright.
Two men, one in a suit and the other in a sweater, sit side by side in folding chairs in a small auditorium. They are listening to an unseen speaker introducing a new inductee to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Whenever I visit another country, I seek out church concerts. The acoustics are amazing and the settings are inspiring. Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church on Second Street rivals any city’s cathedral with its stunning stained glass art, welcoming brick courtyard and architecturally contemporar
BERGAMOT STATION — Incognito, now in its eighth year at Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOA), is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful museum fundraiser/art sales anywhere in the art world.
It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime moment. There I was at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday as the 340-ton boulder — soon to be installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as land artist Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” — rolled down Wilshire Boulevard and posed for its photo opp in front of the museum.
THIRD STREET — Michael McCarty is a man on a mission. It’s not enough that he’s one of the leading progenitors of contemporary cuisine, that he’s a great art collector, that he has not one but two of America’s most celebrated restaurants (Michael’s Santa Monica, Michael’s New York), that he received
SAN DIEGO — Seventy years ago, more than 1,000 Japanese-Americans from Santa Monica and throughout the Westside began reporting to an assembly station at the corner of Venice and Lincoln boulevards to be taken away, prisoners of their own government during the national hysteria of World War II.
If there is a loaded shotgun hanging on the living room wall just below the crucifix, you sort of get a hint of the kind of household you’ve entered. In Martin McDonagh’s play “The Lonesome West,” currently on-stage at the excellent Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica, the household consists of two
